Thursday, November 3, 2016

EclipseCon Europe this year was a really nice event (as always). Here is my brief report from it. I would not cover talks I went to in details as one should be able to watch them online eventuallyFirst of all we had the first Eclipse Platform summit (at least that I know of) with 15-20 attendees. There is the perception that Platform started to improve in terms of new features and openness to the community but there are certain parts that are not there yet so actions are needed there. Biggest pain point expressed was blocking UI and there was some interest towards reducing the dialogs and/or making them non-blocking. Willingness to merge projects was raised but it's not a viable short term solution although it might be good as long term goal. Notifications both in terms of system wide and in-workbench came few times and prototyping SWT support is something we should find time for during Oxygen timeframe. Also Platform is supposed to lead by example and help projects on top of it to adhere to best practices was agreed on but this would require significant time investment in order to get the codebase and UX to that state.

VSCode keynote - quite interesting especially with the mentioning of some debugging protocol they have (similar to the language server). Once language servers and Eclipse intergration catch up going to standardize the debugging should make adding new language support way more straightforward.I had the honor to present "Full CSS styling for SWT and Eclipse" talk - around 20 people in the room (the room wasn't much bigger). It was well received with few comments at the end that people were sceptical in the beginning but it looked promising to them at the end (a noteworthy person changed his opinion from "crazy idea" to "interesting idea"). The idea of using SWT/GTK on Win32 was received way better than I expected - with one guy joined the bug to build himself and hopefully help with further work. It really pleased my ear to hear from few people (that I didn't knew before that) during the conference that they moved towards Linux due to the way better experience they had on GTK/Linux than on Win32.

It was a pleasure to see so many Red Hatters and here about the contributions done by the company in almost every talk I went to or participated including a special place for that in the members meeting. Let's hope that next year our contributions will be even bigger but many other companies would have done their part too.